


christmas blues and other wild phenomenons

by orphan_account



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Christmas, Coming Out, Family Bonding, Family Dynamics, Gaz is a lesbian, Gaz is about 17 while Dib is 19, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Mexican Characters - Freeform, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:54:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21764830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Dib is back from university for the holiday season, and Gaz could not be less thrilled to see him.That's a good thing, and Gaz misses that feeling. If only she could open up to him for once.
Relationships: Dib & Gaz (Invader Zim)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	christmas blues and other wild phenomenons

**YOU LOST.**

The words glowed faintly on television screen, earning a miserable groan from the couch. Gaz would have laughed a little bit if she wasn’t so nervous. Instead, she rolled her eyes and shook her head in disapproval. Dib kicked the air and pointed at the screen, as if that would change their awful failure.

“You saw how it glitched, right? I was just standing there, and then-” Arms and legs flailed upwards, desperate to prove themselves despite their bony composition.

“One of Bowser’s fireballs hit you. What a bad glitch.” More eye rolling.

“It’s because of the control! It’s all stiff, so it didn’t let me jump to avoid it!”

“Uh huh.” Gaz sucked at her teeth in exasperation. It felt good to do that again.

Dib calmed down, sinking in the old furniture with a pout. Gaz nearly forgot how annoying he was, since he hadn’t been living here for the last six months or so; yet the glares she was shooting his way were partly out of love. His awful presence, which had previously haunted her everyday life (and more importantly, distracted her from playing her sacred 3DS), was nostalgic. Too many times these last few months she had no brother to yell at, no brother to make fun of, no brother to blame. It was horrifying.

Christmas was not a holiday Gaz enjoyed. Being gifted socks and some weird, universe-ending contraption every December was not Gaz’s style. The Membranes weren’t even religious, but when asked why they celebrated Christmas anyway, her father would retort with, “It’s tradition!” That didn’t make any sense either, because the only true last Christmas they had was when Gaz’s grandparents could still visit from Mexico. Times were different today, though, so she had to settle for shitty holidays anyway.

Somehow, the day had started off weird. Her father “woke” her up (only to find her already awake, and worse, yelling at her Nintendo Switch screen), Dib had fallen down the stairs while she wasn’t there to see it, she had worn her clothes inside out by accident; however, that wasn’t the weirdest part of the day. No, the worst part was Dib himself. Dib’s arrival meant one thing, and one thing only: he didn’t know something Gaz did. In any other case, she wouldn’t have told him anything, but this was important. So important it made Gaz feel like utter shit.

Now, though, as they were sitting in silence, Gaz could think about new ways to annoy her brother while he was still here, maybe to get her mind off the pressing matter at hand. Preparing the salt on the wound, she stood up.

“Want to play Mortal Kombat?” The simple words pierced her brother’s heart with an unrelenting sharpness. He always lost, without fail, to Gaz when they were playing Mortal Kombat. But should he say no, he’d have to face Gaz in her most irritated-

“Yeah, sure. Bring out the Playstation, though, I’m not good with this Switch thing.”

Gaz blinked. She wasn’t expecting such a nonchalant response. Shouldn’t he be groaning in pain right about now? Begging at her feet to spare him from humiliating, definite defeat? Maybe University had changed him, made him less of a weirdo. Maybe.

“Okay.” She shuffled over to her shelf of consoles, carefully setting her hands on the dusty Playstation 2. It was rare for Gaz to be uncomfortable; annoyed and bitter were common emotions for her, but uncomfortable? The newfound feeling made her feel even more out of place, which in turn, annoyed her even more. While she unplugged the Switch and began to plug in the Playstation 2, her head spun with emotions she wasn’t used to, causing her to lose her focus. She nearly slammed the cord into the wall. Fucking wall outlets.

“Need any help there?” Dib’s voice could he heard from the couch still, and Gaz was  _ embarrassed _ now. 

“No.”

“Uh, okay, but if you need anything-”

“It’s plugged in now.”

The siblings fell into silence again. Gaz sat down on the couch, offering no explanation, and grabbed a controller for herself and another for Dib. She effortlessly started the game without even looking, already knowing the controls like the back of her hand, but she could not focus. She didn’t need to focus to beat Dib, of course, but it only made her feel more and more… weird, and even gross, as time went on.

What the hell was wrong with her?

After about three rounds of Gaz winning and Dib hilariously losing, the dread settled in. What if he had changed too much? What if those freaks at University forced him to change, and maybe, just maybe, her ultimate plan would fail? Would he hate her, demean her, leave and never visit again? The questioned piled up like a particularly hard boss battle, or like forgotten game cartridges gathering dust. Gaz swallowed, trying to shake the doubt out of her system, and then...

“Are you okay?”

The words snapped Gaz out of her limbo. She was reluctant to look back at Dib, now that she was visibly trembling from her thoughts. Gaz sighed irritably, gripping the controller like her life depended on it.

“I’m fine.”

“But, you lost.”

What?

Gaz finally looked up at the screen. PLAYER 2 WINS! Was in bright letters, hypnotizing her and nearly causing her to vomit. Gaz, lose to her pitiful brother? At video games? Gaz swallowed. She couldn’t really care all that much about what Dib thought, did she? Right? Right?

“If you’re not feeling well, I can call Dad over. Do you need something?”

Suddenly, Gaz couldn’t breathe. The accumulation of everything crashed into each other in her brain, calamitous and awful and absolutely atrocious.

She was normal. She absolutely had to be normal. She was not something to inspect like her counselors at school tried to do. She was Gazlene Membrane, completely normal.

“Dib, I have a girlfriend.” The words left her before she could even think them.

The words suspended themselves in the air like a heavy fog. The room grew tense, the way an eye of a hurricane stays still while chaos whirls around it. Gaz could only hear her heartbeat; this was absolutely disgusting. Gaz had never felt so humiliated, so awful, and this time it wasn’t anyone’s fault but hers. She desperately wanted to change the subject, maybe to Dib’s weird obsession with that alien when they were kids, or to how his badly shaved stubble looked awful, but she couldn’t make any other words come out. 

It was simultaneously terrifying yet liberating at the same time. Gaz felt like she had coughed up a plague, her closely guarded secret, and yet she somehow felt lighter, as if she had let go of a weight on her shoulders. Whether that lightness was a positive or negative feeling, Gaz didn’t have the time to figure out.

“Okay. What’s she like?”

“What?”

“Like. Where’d you meet her, and stuff.”

Gaz blinked at Dib. She just came out to him and he was asking her about her girlfriend like it was absolutely nothing? She felt like screaming at him; why didn’t he get angry? Or upset? Or show any other emotions rather than nonchalant curiosity? She was furious. All of the shame, guilt, worries turned into rage. It felt hot like a burning fire in the pit of her chest, like if she opened her mouth fire would come out.

“You’re not going to say anything else?” Her tone was sharp, like a carefully polished knife; why was she so angry? Why?

“Uh, no. I have a gay roommate, it’s cool.” Dib raised a brow and looked at her like she was a subject to investigate, someone to test. It only made her angrier.

“I didn’t say I was gay. I’m not like your roommate, either. I’m your sister, and I have a girlfriend.” Her words slithered into harsh, quiet yells, and her hands were shaking. Her nails made little half-moons in her palm, indents burning but not in an unpleasant way.

“Gaz, that’s fine. Sorry, er, if I compared you to, y’know-”

“God, shut up. You’re so embarrassing even when I’m trying to come out to you, you loser.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know!”

The pair of siblings quieted. Gaz breathed, in and out, and looked away from Dib. She stopped shaking and released her nails from her hands, staring at them the way she did when she didn’t know what else to do. It took a few minutes for her to calm down. She wasn’t crying, not like those YouTubers did when they painfully said “I’m gay,” or, “I’m trans,” or “I’m bi,” despite it being in the title. She watched those in late nights, scrolling through sobbing faces to prepare her for what she herself had to do. Would she be called embarrassing and cringy, in the comments of her own coming out moment? Gaz thought about it often, stirring the questions with a spoon and peering at the alphabet soup letters at school and everywhere she went. But now was different.

She wasn’t embarrassing. She wasn’t being cringeworthy. She was just Gaz. A girl with a girlfriend talking to her very annoying older brother, so close to Navidad and avoiding her annoying dad downstairs.

“Gaz.”

“What?”

“I love you. It’s cool that you have a girlfriend, I kinda suspected you’d get one before me.”

Gaz couldn’t help but snicker at that. “You’re so lame.” She threw a pillow at him without looking, which made his glasses do a ‘clunk’ sound on the floor. Dork.

“It’s true!” The pillow hit her in her back.

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Gaz turned around finally, and quietly added, “I met her at a concert. She’s like, cool. My age.”

“Where does she go to school?”

“Memorial. She’s gonna graduate. She’s into science, like you, but she’s not lame.”

“Cool.”

“I love you too, by the way. Don’t make me say it again.”

“I won’t.”

Gaz got up, her Pok é mon socks hitting the floor. “Dad probably already set the table.” There was nothing left to say but that.

“Please tell me he didn’t just pop some frozen tamales in the freezer like last Christmas.” A groan arose from Dib.

“No. I helped him make them this time. They’re pretty fucking good.”

Dib smiled. For once, Gaz didn’t feel revolted at his happiness.

They weren’t the type of siblings that cried it out or hugged it out, but they understood each other. Dib was an adult now, pursuing an Anthropology degree. Gaz had a girlfriend, still miserable in highschool. They were both kids of a mad scientist who kinda developed technology for the entire world. While they never hugged or anything like that, it was comforting. 

“Race you to the kitchen?” Dib asked.

“What are you, twelve?” Gaz pushed him and then ran out of her room, Dib following close behind in a beeline to the kitchen. This Membrane Christmas was bound to be as chaotic as the last.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a commissioned piece; I haven't seen Invader Zim in ages, but this was very fun. I hope I could capture the closeted gay experience in this piece. Overall, I hope you have a happy holiday season, and that you get some time to spend time with your family, even if they're dweebs like Dib.


End file.
